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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> I still don't comprehend why Dorsey didn't just try to make the largest ActivityPub server on the web.

Have you seen the ecosystem study BlueSky published in 2020? https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosyste...

Bit more of a summary https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1511811083954102273

BlueSky/AT Protocol seems to have pretty distinct design goals that are not possible with ActivityPub.

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Yeah, I have read about the things they want to do which are mostly cryptography related and which have absolutely zero reasoning as to _why_ they can't be done with ActivityPub. Signing all your messages? Yeah, you can append Ed25519 signature chains to any ActivityPub message. You could publish your base public key when creating an account. You could make software that hides all this beneath an abstraction layer so the end-user never has to deal with it. Exporting all your data and uploading it to another server is something you can already do with Mastodon. E2EE message? Coming soon to Mastodon. It's all things you can do _very easily_ on top of a fault tolerant federated public messaging system.

ActivityPub of course uses the same cryptographic certification virtually all the web does, just TLS/HTTPS and relies on the host cert to be valid. But if you wanted to add further levels of verification like pubkeys and sigs, there's absolutely nothing stopping you.

> Yeah, I have read about the things they want to do which are mostly cryptography related and which have absolutely zero reasoning as to _why_ they can't be done with ActivityPub.

I guess the race is on, then. Surely ActivityPub, with its much larger user and developer base, will grab the best ideas from AT Protocol and squash this redundant newcomer.

Differences in funding also matter.

Yeah, AT Protocol being "funded" by one company (Bluesky PBLLC) and ActivityPub being indirectly "funded" by multiple companies + organizations, some of them being Nextcloud GmbH, Framasoft (PeerTube), Tumblr (Yahoo).

Seems based on that variable, ActivityPub has the benefit of being more widespread, but that tends to also make changes go through slower. ActivityPub being a specification maintained by W3C also make changes extra slow, but stable at least, while AT Protocol probably won't have any stability guarantees for a long time.

Proponents of ActivityPub talk a lot about how flexible it is. I think that's the problem here.

Sure you could implement BlueSky-over-activitypub, but would it be usefully compatibile with mastodon-over-activitypub? If not, why add the complexity.

Can't comment on the bluesky aspect, but you've touched on my frustration with ActivityPub. When people were migrating to Mastodon, I took a look at making a single-user instance that would suit my personal needs and gracefully interact with the wider ecosystem and found that in my case the capabilities of ActivityPub are irrelevant, you are tied to the Mastodon teams choices.

Felt very much like in practice it just gives you tools to make mostly-insular federated apps, rather than letting different apps interact.

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